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Palomar Mountain is more pleasant than most. The dormitory (called the "Monastery") is pleasant too. For day-sleeping astronomers, the bedrooms have soundproofed walls and doors and black window shades. The only intruders in this astronomical Eden are the woodpeckers that like to drill away at the Monastery's copper roof.
Energy & Neutrons. All of Hubble's colleagues have projects for Palomar Mountain. Dr. Ira Bowen, Director of the Observatory, hopes to analyze the stars with superior spectrographs and find out what nuclear reactions are supplying the energy for their outpouring light. Dr. Bowen is a cautious man, but in the back of his head is a more daring project. No present-day star, he believes, has enough pressure or temperature to form the atoms of the heavier elements. Perhaps, he speculates, they were formed during the genesis of the exploding universe, two billion years or more ago, when all the matter in all the nebulae was concentrated in a single mass inconceivably hotter and denser than anything existing now.
Astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky of CalTech (who doubles in rocket propulsion) hopes to go gunning with the 200-inch for neutron stars and gravitational lenses. Various theories of stellar evolution tell how stars may be born and decline to stellar senility. Zwicky thinks that the last stage may be a star made up chiefly of neutrons. Since neutrons are very much denser than atoms, such stars might be only ten miles in diameter. Every cubic centimeter of their volume would weigh, Zwicky figures, about one million tons.
Hubble's own program for the 200-inch is mainly along two lines. He hopes to clock the speeds of nebulae up to 500 million light-years away, to see if their speed of recession still increases with increasing distance. If it does, his exploding universe theory will be on a firmer footing.
Meanwhile, he will look for evidence that the "red shift" does not indicate speed but is due to some other effect, such as light getting "tired." Hubble does not expect such evidence, but will welcome it if he finds it. Tired light, he thinks, would be a discovery quite as sensational as the exploding universe.
Curved Space. Hubble also intends to count the nebulae that can be photographed up to the billion-light-year range of the 200-inch. Behind this humdrum-sounding chore lies the eerie, brain-staggering problem of the curvature of space. Mathematical physicists believe (from Einstein's ubiquitous Relativity) that space is curved back upon itself, in a four-dimensional way, by the gravitational effect of the matter it contains. The curvature is too slight to be detected on earth or even in the enormous sphere, 500 million light-years in radius, penetrated by the 100-inch telescope. But theory hints that doubling the radius to the billion-light-year radius of the 200-inch may show up the curvature.
Curved space is apparently understandable to Professor Howard P. Robertson, leading cosmologist who has come to Pasadena to look over Hubble's shoulder. Suppose, says Robertson, you draw two circles on a sheet of paper, one with a radius of one inch, the other with a radius of two inches. By high-school plane geometry, the second circle will have four times the area of the first one.